“If we open our eyes, if we open our minds, if we open our hearts, will find that this world is a magical place. It is magical not because it tricks us or changes unexpectedly into something else, but because it can be so vividly and brilliantly.”--Chogyam Trungpa

When I was a child, I longed for magic: actively, forcefully, wistfully. I spent thousands of hours reading books about witches and wizards and fairies and everyday objects endowed with supernatural powers, I read about kids who time-traveled or fell into other dimensions or discovered secret portals to other lives. I always wanted to be one of those characters from the story, happening on magic that would transport me from my problems, my boredom, my malaise (French translation: being poorly-at-ease) with life. As I grew older, I stopped believing...

Our ancestors had far more contact with magic. They lived life closer to nature, a force larger than life. They saw themselves as an intrinsic part of a pattern that happened around them and to them and in them and through them, an ongoing dialogue with equals. Rather than placing themselves above the objects we see as inanimate, everything they saw and experienced in the physical world was a endowed with the life force... (Click title to read full post)

The Four Archetypes of the Mature Masculine: Introduction

Another way of approaching the cure for the modern male malaise comes from the book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, by Jungian psychologist Robert Moore and mythologist Douglas Gillette. Moore argues that masculinity is made up of four archetypal male energies which serve different purposes. All men, whether born in the U.S. or Africa, are born with these archetypal energies. The authors argue that to become a complete man, a man must work to develop all four archetypes. The result of striving to become complete is a feeling of manly confidence and purpose.

The wedding and specifically the bride just might be one of the grandest of all archetypal images. We commonly associate weddings with the bride and the groom, but I’m going to make a case for the bride alone as a prime archetypal image and symbol for transpersonal love and union–the alchemical phase of the coniunctio.

But before I talk about archetypes, unions and the coniunctio, I feel a need to mention a qualifier. This post is personal for me. I was married several months ago, and I still retain the feelings and keen memories of the experience and what it felt like to be swept away by love.

While reflecting upon standing at the alter while waiting for and watching the bride walking down the aisle, I realized two things. One was this: ”we” (bride and groom) and “I,” were a part of something much larger. And two: the bride and her image, carried the wedding. Even the behavior of those attending spoke to this, as people and the ceremony itself pivoted around the bride. And this is how it should be, because the image of the bride is so much more than a woman getting married to a man.

Since this article also talks about the often misunderstood Jungian concept of the archetype, I’m going to use a metaphor by Jung himself ... (click title for more)

What the unearthing of Carl Jung’s Red book is doing to the Jungs and the Jungians (and maybe your dreams).

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

But between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure...

“Building the psychic vessel of containment, which is another way of speaking of soul-making, seems to require bleeding and leaking as its precondition. Why else go through that work unless we are driven by the despair of our unstoppered condition?

The shift from anima-mess to anima-vessel shows in various ways: as a shift from weakness and suffering to humility and sensitivity; from bitterness and complaint to a tastefor salt and blood; from focus upon the emotional pain of the wound – its causes, perimeters, cures – to its imaginal depths; from displacements of the womb onto women and “femininity” to its locus in ones own bodily rhythm…

We have said that each symptom brings the archetypal condition of woundedness. Although the wound may be experienced through a symptom, they are not the same. A symptom belongs to diagnosis, pointing to something else underlying. But the wound, as we have (Click title to keep reading)

Being a Jungian analyst at this time in history is not particularly comfortable in most psychological or intellectual circles. Jungians are supposed to believe in universal human characteristics called "archetypes" and to support the theory that we all share a collective unconscious. Although Jung's work has some popular appeal, his ideas now seem antiquated in the light of current philosophical and scientific approaches. Mostly his work is not taught in college psychology departments, medical schools, or other places where it could have a broad impact on the way psychotherapy is practiced in the US today.

Because Jung's psychology is grounded in a theory of universals, what all human beings have in common, it appears to be in conflict with many fashionable poll-modern theories. In the past two decades, any belief in universal truths or characteristics has come under close scrutiny and often been dismissed, at least in academic circles. Post-modernism is a broad cultural critique that has challenged theories of self, coherence, and almost all and any claims to truth. These are hard times for a Jungian who is supposed to believe in a universal Self, not only in characteristics that are shared among... (Click title to continue reading)

Carl Gustav Jung’s persistence in deciphering the cryptic, convoluted, and exasperating imagery presented in many ancient, medieval and Renaissance alchemical manuscripts was instrumental in eliciting a renewed twentieth century interest in alchemy as a corroborating aspect of depth psychotherapy. In the last few centuries preceding this phenomenon alchemy had fallen into disrepute as a rudimentary protochemistry superseded by the manifold developments of Enlightenment science, a discipline of no practicable use except to the quacks of Victorian occultism who still ambled about in garage laboratories trying to transmute lead into gold and perfecting methods of pseudo-transmutation by which select credulous members of the general public might be duped.

The Jungian concept Unus Mundus suggests that human elements are simultaneously separate and unified. Unus Mundus is said to be the deepest part of our unconscious, the place where earth and heaven meet and are unified. There body, spirit, our souls and the world soul reunites. In effect, our inner world of fantasy, imagination and dreams are said to cross over into outer events. Jung’s Theory of Synchronicity or acausal connection of two or more physic phenomena, or meaningful coincidences suggests that these coincidences happen all the time to help us understand ourselves better.

More than anyone else in the 20th century, the psychologist is responsible for our wide interest in what we can call "inner directed spirituality." He saw the unconscious mind as a hidden treasure, not a basement or cellar where we hide away everything about ourselves we'd rather not face. For Jung, the unconscious was a positive, life-giving part of our psyche and we ignored it at our peril.

Jung's conviction about the creative role of the unconscious came to him during a traumatic psychic upheaval that followed his break with Freud. Jung charted the course of this "creative illness" in his legendary Red Book, a mysterious tome filled with fantastic watercolor paintings and intricate calligraphy, that Jung kept secret for many years, and which was published for the first time only in...(click title to keep reading)

Carl Jung is still relevant today because our search for meaning is still relevant. #Spirituality and #religion comes up quite often in my work with clients. Both have helped them in their journey towards healing. They have faced terrible things but they find comfort and calm in their spiritual lives and for many their prayer lives too.

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